24th Letter Of The Alphabet

Earlier 10 Was X: The Nighttime Horse Story Of The 24th Letter

Published January 9, 2019

With its long, cryptic history and multiple phonemes, the alphabetic character X is quite a dark horse. It can mean Christ, like theX in Xmas, stand up for a chromosome, and even show upwardly in friendly and dotty correspondence (XOXO).

But, how did 10 cease up in the alphabet to begin with?

The origin of X

Since its inception, the alphabetic character 10 has struggled to establish its own identity, so information technology may be no coincidence that 10 is commonly used to represent the unknown in both language and mathematics. But, how was it created?X is derived from the Phoenician letter of the alphabet samekh, meaning "fish." Originally used by the Phoenicians to represent the /due south/ consonant (denoting a difficult S sound), the Greeks borrowed the samekh around 900 BC and named it Chi.

The ancient Greeks utilized their newly acquired phonological chemical element to simplify the digraph ("a pair of letters representing a single speech sound") /ks/, which is used most prominently throughout the western regions of Greece.

The Romans subsequently adopted the Ten sound from the Chalcidian alphabet, a not-Ionic Greek alphabet, and borrowed the Chi symbol, consisting of two diagonally crossed strokes, from the Greek alphabet to denote the letter 10 likewise as to identify the Roman numeral Ten or "10."

So to sum up: The Romans took the /ten/ audio from ane alphabet (Chalcidian) and combined it with the Chi symbol from another alphabet (Greek) and thus Ten was born.

WATCH: Where Do "XX" And "XXX" Come From?

How to say 10

Like many letters in the English linguistic communication, such every bit Cand J, X is a fleck of a phonetic chameleon. For case, Xis used to institute the /ks/ audio, as in wax and pull a fast one on—referred to every bit a "voiceless velar fricative," in case y'all were really wondering. This joint is made by placing the dorsum of the tongue at the soft palate.

The same rule applies for Ten's /gz/ sound, as in auxiliary and exhaust. 10 tin also have on the /z/ audio as in xylophone and Xanadu, the hard /thousand/ audio as in excite, and /kzh/ every bit in luxury. The X tin can also be silent as in Sioux (Falls), and the French loan-word imitation.